


Patchwork People

by ifyouwereamelody



Series: Zutara Fanwork Appreciation Week [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Pre-Comet, Pre-Episode: s03e18-21 Sozin's Comet, The White Lotus Camp, Zutara Fanwork Appreciation Week 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:15:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27691241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifyouwereamelody/pseuds/ifyouwereamelody
Summary: ‘Zuko, be safe. Be safe, okay? Whatever you do today, wherever you end up, you have to just— There hasn’t been enough time.’His voice is as coarse and probing as his fingertips.‘Enough time? For what?'‘For me to know you.’With Sozin's Comet fast-approaching and the prospect of battle bearing down on them, a moment of quiet is stolen in the camp of the White Lotus.
Relationships: Katara & Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Zutara Fanwork Appreciation Week [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025041
Comments: 19
Kudos: 193





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, beautiful people! Some of you will already be aware that this week is Zutara Fanwork Appreciation Week, and if you weren't aware before then now you know! It's a wonderful concept, whereby fans are putting together works inspired by other creators in the fandom -- check out tumblr where things are getting posted all the time, and let your favourite content creators know how much you love them!
> 
> Kicking off with my first written piece for Fanart Tuesday, here is a fic inspired by this beautiful piece of art by tumblr user and illustrator @prom-knight -- https://prom-knight.tumblr.com/post/181183048968. The moment of tenderness was too much to pass by, and I really hope I've done it justice in this fic.
> 
> Enjoy!

‘Something wrong with your bedroll?’

It’s an unconventional way of saying ‘good morning’, she’ll admit. But seeing as she’s just walked into Zuko’s tent to find him lying flat on the floor, his shirt and bedroll thrown unceremoniously away to one side as if they’ve slighted him, Katara reckons it’s pretty appropriate.

He doesn’t sit up, instead tilting his head backwards to throw an upside-down glance in her direction before settling back into staring at the canopy above him.

‘No. It’s fine.’

‘So... What are you doing on the floor?’

She steps into his line of vision and his eyes flicker, focus sharpening on her face as she stands over him. Now that she can see his expression — that lined frustration that pulls against his forehead, the slight flush borne across the rise of his cheekbones — the amusement in her fades to make way for a curl of concern. Something’s not right.

‘The comet’s getting closer. It’s making me feel—’ He grimaces, screws his eyes shut, twitches a little where he lies. ‘—itchy. Too hot.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine. Just uncomfortable. The floor’s a lot better than the bedroll.’ His eyes open again, a flash of gold in the muted early-morning light that seeps through the tent canvas. ‘Did you want something? Are you looking for Sokka?’

Katara scoffs, some of the levity coming back to her with his reassurance.

‘As if we don’t all know he snuck out into Suki’s tent as soon as everyone turned in for the night.’

‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’

‘No need, your face is doing all the commenting for you.’

As if in response, Zuko slings an arm across his eyes, the light curve of his smile left visible beneath it as a chuckle huffs out of him. Katara does her best to ignore the way bared plane of his abdomen tenses with the sound.

‘Why _did_ you come in here, then?’

She knows he can’t see her shrug, but she shrugs all the same.

‘Toph was snoring, people are starting to move around outside... Everything’s going to start _happening_ soon and once it starts it’s not going to stop until— I don’t know, I think I felt like I wanted to be alone for a bit, maybe? Before it all begins.’

‘You thought this tent was empty?’

‘No. No, I knew you were in here.’

He doesn’t shift from where he’s lying, doesn’t lift his arm so that he can meet her eyes in response to the half-admission, and if she hadn’t spent the last few weeks getting used to the rise and fall of his voice she might have missed the slight hesitation, the sudden care he takes when he speaks. As it is, she’s become almost _too_ attuned to the different shapes his words take as he flows between moods and intents, and the delicate thrill at her seeking him out comes through loud and clear underneath his attempt to make light.

‘Wanted to be alone, came into a tent you knew was occupied... You’re good at not making sense.’

‘Well, I _am_ much smarter than you, so I can see why you’d think that.’

At that, Zuko turns his head just enough that he can find her foot and jab down on it with his elbow, his arm pulling away from his face to unveil the full force of his narrow-eyed scowl. There’s a laugh sitting just below the surface, though, one that ripples out of him as she nudges at his temple with the toe of her boot in retaliation. And perhaps it’s bold — bolder than she’s used to being with him — but somewhere between his laughter and the sinewy tension of the oncoming day, Katara opens up enough space to say what she might otherwise have left unsaid.

‘I guess you’re just the one I want to be around when I don’t want to be around anybody.’

He doesn’t speak in response, settling for a grunt of acknowledgement that rumbles in the back of his throat. But his hand reaches up behind him, his fingers seeking out the hem of her tunic, and he tugs gently until she folds herself down to sit cross-legged on the ground by his head.

Closer to him now, she can see the light sheen of sweat that glistens on his brow more clearly, the dusty purple streaks daubed under his eyes. Her hands are reaching for his discomfort before she has the chance to stop them.

(Not that she’d ever _want_ to stop them, really.)

He’s hot to touch, even more so than usual, and her fingers go carding through the dampened darkness of his hair in an attempt to ease the fervour that the approaching comet is stoking in him; she watches some of the tautness seep from him under her attention, the strained lines of his face softening into memory with him falling pliant to her hands.

‘Did you actually manage to sleep last night, then? With the comet on its way?’

‘Maybe an hour or two. I’ll end up getting more right now if you keep doing that, though.’

His eyes drift closed as he speaks, and the ghost of a laugh finds its way out of her mouth.

‘It’d probably do you some good. We should all be well-rested for what’s coming.’ Katara pauses in her ministrations to tap him lightly on the forehead. ‘Lift.’

His head pulls up off the ground, leaving her room to shuffle further into his space until she can reach out and guide him back down to rest in her lap. And there’s a moment of quiet as their gazes meet in this strange, upside down assembly, as she discovers a new way to see the gilded spark in his eyes and the familiar slopes of his face, before her fingers come up again to wander across his brow. She lets loose a breath, easy and slow, and a little of her power leaks out to run cool over his skin in the wake of her touch.

‘Huh. That’s... nice.’

‘Perks of having a waterbender around.’

His lips quirk.

‘Knew there had to be at least one.’

That earns him a flick to the ear which leaves him chuckling, his smile flashing bright in a way that tugs in her stomach and sends her eyes skating over him where he lies stretched out before her.

It crosses her mind, not for the first time, how little she actually knows of the different parts that come together to make him whole, how many stories he holds that she has no notion of yet. They’re patchwork people, both of them, and it’s only been a matter of weeks since the pieces that make them up started being cut from the same swathes of cloth. They share stitches from before, yes — snags in their tapestries from where their paths have previously crossed and caught, sections of needlework born from common design — but up until recently, even the parts of him that looked the most familiar had been made by different hands, laced with different purpose and intent and expectation to hers.

He has whole stretches of him sewn in fabrics that she’s never seen before.

He is threadbare at best, the surface of him worn too thin for a man so recently a boy.

He is spun and silken, scratching-coarse and down-soft, and by the gods if she doesn’t want to know how every facet of his weaving feels under her fingers.

The thought permeates, twisting down her arms and pulling her hands away from his hair to drift wonderingly across the angles of his face. Zuko stills, suddenly breath-holdingly watchful; his eyes stay fixed on her as she traces the rise and fall of his cheekbones, the point of his chin, the bow of his lips, only falling closed when her touch alights momentarily on his eyelids before meandering away again to round the angle of his jaw. It’s just as she begins to follow the line of muscle running down the side of his neck that the quiet tension drawn between them snaps — he starts, his shoulders hunching upwards as he jerks away from her exploration, and all at once Katara breaks out of the reverie to find herself swathed in embarrassment.

‘Sorry, sorry, I—’

But Zuko’s head is already dropping back into her lap, hand reaching up towards her and hovering in the air above him as reassurance.

‘No, you’re fine, it wasn’t because I didn’t want— You just—’

He cuts off with a huff of frustration and scrubs the heel of his palm hard into his forehead, face screwing up in a grimace.

‘It tickled.’

Katara stares down at him, nonplussed into silence for a moment before—

‘It... tickled?’

And she can’t hold back a laugh. The idea that this boy — this intense, turbulent boy — could be debilitated by something as simple as a touch in the right place would’ve seemed so improbably _human_ just a few weeks ago, but now... Now it’s another velvety square to add to his steadily-growing tapestry that’s made a place for itself in her head.

‘Shut up,’ he grumbles, his nose wrinkling with a barely-concealed and only slightly grudging smile.

‘Sorry, it just seemed— Never mind.’ Her laugh turns self-conscious. Nervous, even. ‘So, um... You didn’t mind that I was...’

_Mapping you. Searching you._

Zuko falls silent, again choosing to answer her in actions rather than words.

(This is a thread that she’s familiar with by now — his preference for touch over voice. It seems to run twisting and universal through every part of him that she’s seen so far.)

Once more, his head turns in search of something. Once more, he reaches back overhead. But this time his fingers curl around hers, his grip gentle as he guides her touch back to his skin, eyes bronzed and heavy. The curves of his shoulders are hot, solid under her hands. His collarbones offer a pathway to the hollow of his throat, which in turn opens out into that vast, beaten expanse beyond; she leans that bit further over him, extending her reach to seek out the pale stripes of scar, the snarled patches of long-healed burns that adorn his chest after years of fighting and mending and fighting again.

There had been a time, after Ba Sing Se, when she’d thought she couldn’t fold that way anymore, could no longer bend in his direction — not for the thick seam of twine that she had to wind up her back to close the hole his betrayal tore. It left her stiff and starched and yet somehow less durable, so that by the time he found his way to their side, it took more effort than she ever would have expected to keep herself from fraying in his presence.

But she understands tides well enough to know when they’ve turned. And, spirits, have they turned.

It came gentle and unspoken, the change. Forgiving him was just the first step, it turned out, just the door that needed to open in order for them to tread, blinking and tentative, into a whole new realm of quickened heartbeats and accidental touches and not-so-accidental touches—

What she’s learned of his body so far has been gathered, much the same as her understanding of his character, scrap by scrap; a brush of knuckles, a hand at her back, an evening spent sitting that bit too close, slowly descending further and further into a place that could scarcely be called _casual_ anymore.

And now she’s here, all trace of pretence lost, running her hands over the parts of him that are puckered and knotted with his attempts at self-repair. The stitches are imperfect, sewn clumsily in spates of fevered, pained determination, but they hold fast and strong for the resolve in their threading.

Through everything so far, they’ve held. He’s held.

Katara’s so lost in thought that at first she doesn’t notice her contact being returned. Then his fingers wind their way up her arm and thread through the hair at the back of her neck, pressing gently at the knot of tension that she carries there, and suddenly it’s all she _can_ notice. Zuko’s burning up, _searing_ her with his touch, with his gaze, with the intensity of his silence, and it’s only in searching for some way to let the heat escape that she finds words spilling unbidden from her lips.

‘Zuko, be safe. Be safe, okay? Whatever you do today, wherever you end up, you have to just— There hasn’t been enough time.’

His voice is as coarse and probing as his fingertips.

‘Enough time? For what?’

‘For me to know you.’

Cold air rushes in to fill the gap left by Zuko’s absence as he pulls abruptly away, disentangling from the space where they’ve woven themselves together.

She’s said too much, voiced something that they’ve been keeping carefully quiet until now, and she finds herself stumbling to justify the breach.

‘I just— I need you to—’

But he pulls up to a sit, turning as he goes, and then he’s reaching for her again, drawing them together to press his forehead tight against hers.

‘I will if you will.’

It’s a promise that he can’t possibly keep, but he makes it in the way he brushes her nose with his, the way his thumb rests at the corner of her mouth as he lingers barely a sigh away from her.

It’s a kiss in every way but the meeting of lips, a kiss in every way that matters, and Katara hardly dares to breathe; it feels too much as though the slightest movement could send her unravelling.

Because it’s coming, the reckoning. Who knows what new rips they’ll have acquired by this time tomorrow? How many new scorch marks will she find on him the next time she looks, how many holes worn through in need of fixing? How much damage can someone take before the seams holding them together give way and they fall apart completely?

It would be so easy. So _easy_ to think that this might be the last time she sees him whole, to think that this is the moment for them to be whatever it is that they want to be for each other, and the urge to close the gap separating them is so strong that she finds herself teetering right there on the brink.

But no.

No, she refuses to give in to that final-hour desperation. To surrender now would be to accept the chance that they might not make it through what’s coming, and that is something that Katara can’t do, _won’t_ do. Besides, perhaps if they leave this unfinished, something out there in the universe with the power to sway these things will find a way to see them through. Perhaps, amongst all the chaos, there is some rhyme or reason to the way things play out, and this loose end will be the cord that pulls them through and past it all to a place where they can finish what they’ve started. 

So for now there is this: this infinitesimal space so brimming with potential that they balance between them, this moment where they hang suspended in the air of each other’s breath, this whisper of _more, maybe more_ when the battle is through and won and, yes, _survived_ —

For now, there is this.

She pulls away enough that Zuko comes into focus, blazing before her. His fingers graze against the curve of her ear as he brushes the hair back from her face, and she flutters, she ripples by his breeze. As his hand falls, Katara catches it in her own, bringing it to her lips to let her breath float across his knuckles for the space of one, three, five reverberating heartbeats. Then, all at once, she releases him and draws herself up to a stand.

‘I’ll see you out there.’

And she’s not expecting an answer, but the shine of his eyes speaks volumes nonetheless. It’s agreed: however this next part goes, whatever tears at them, however ragged they’re run by the coming fight, this will not be the last scrap of themselves that they share with one another.

They’re bound, irrevocably tangled together.

And they aren’t done. Not yet.


	2. Chapter 2

Just a note in case anyone has bookmarked this to follow-up with part II, it's up and you can find it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27733741

Love to all! 

**Author's Note:**

> There is a part II to this story, which can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27733741
> 
> Let me know what you think!


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